tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61470278279590132202015-01-07T12:30:50.313+11:00Derek's ALIA BlogDerek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.comBlogger241125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-60848258587377911692012-02-03T08:07:00.000+11:002012-02-03T14:52:03.744+11:00Word of the day - nicheToday's word is niche, used as a verb. In fact, used at a meeting that I recently attended, in the sentence "We have to niche up some of the messages." It is interesting that niche seems to take the preposition "up" although it could just as well have taken the opposite - "niche down".
Dictionary.com accepts niche as a verb and gives the brief definition "to place [something] in a niche." Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-29816836683547794272012-01-25T08:14:00.008+11:002012-01-25T10:03:56.943+11:00Word of the dayToday's word is caveat, used as a verb. Used in a meeting right here, yesterday. But I loved it at first sight. In fact, this usage goes back some time.
We all know what a caveat is in normal usage - it is used in the sense of a qualification or warning, a limitation to a statement's face value meaning. It is from Latin, and is used in Latin expressions such as caveat emptor (let the buyer Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-6560499270033411892011-12-27T09:49:00.004+11:002012-01-04T16:38:49.940+11:00Word of the dayToday's word is goat rodeo. According to the notes on my CD of The Goat Rodeo Sessions, quoting the Urban Dictionary, a goat rodeo is "A chaotic situation, often one that involves several people, each with a different agenda/vision/perception of what's going on; a situation that is very difficult, despite energy and efforts, to instill any sense or order into", or "A situation that order cannot Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-42728649104089898622011-10-20T18:48:00.001+11:002011-10-20T18:48:00.246+11:00Word of the dayNames are always a source of interest, and one of my favourite categories of names is people with two surnames - like Gordon Thomas, or Jackson Jackson. Unlike most names in English, they are also reversible.
Today's word is Jay, a name and a letter. I have been reading about the tussle between Mike Rann, premier of South Australia, and Jay Weatherill (picture with family, and article about him Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-17053904229477990062011-10-20T08:42:00.000+11:002011-10-20T08:42:10.872+11:00Word of the dayToday's word is litotes, a word I cannot remember ever reading before. Off, because the meaning of the term is something we do every day. Well, I do. It means, according to the Wikipedia, "a figure of speech in which understatement is employed for rhetorical effect when an idea is expressed by a denial of its opposite . . ." For example, "not as young as he was", meaning "old". It is common in Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-8339788399695295872011-10-04T18:31:00.000+11:002011-10-04T18:31:28.248+11:00Word of the dayIf you are a fan of Roddy Doyle - and who isn't? - then you will enjoy his column on Dublin in The Daily Beast, or Newsweek as it is also called. "Dublin city is the sound of people who love words, who love taking words and playing with them, twisting and bending them, making short ones longer and the long ones shorter, people who love inventing words and giving fresh meaning to old ones." His Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-50455221732871576142011-10-04T15:47:00.017+11:002011-10-04T18:09:20.018+11:00Word of the dayToday's word is mass personalisation - a clever formulation because it is apparently an oxymoron, but in fact not. It means that much in contemporary education, especially higher education, should be optional at the student's option. Such things as attendance, learning styles, scheduling, on/off campus learning, and so on. Along with this concept is the idea that content is ubiquitous, and Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-85448158518064807652011-09-01T08:07:00.004+10:002011-09-01T08:12:11.959+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is tickety boo. Going smoothly, doing alright, copacetic according to the Urban Dictionary. Copacetic?As an optimist, I like cheerful, upbeat expressions, and this is one of them, albeit one which has largely passed out of use. I had thought that this might be one of those expressions from my parents' times which had become quaintly archaic.
In fact, if you use Google's Books Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-55534541362761748752011-08-25T08:14:00.002+10:002011-08-25T17:21:07.783+10:00Best football team in the worldWhy is Barcelona (Barça) the best football team in the world? asks The Economist's management columnist Schumpeter. Part of the answer lies in an article written by my colleague Peter Gerrand and published in firstmonday five years ago - "Cultural diversity in cyberspace: the Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain". It details the struggle to achieve a unique top level domain name Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-50753531015997305302011-08-19T13:15:00.003+10:002011-08-19T14:49:45.636+10:00Thinking About NamesLorcan Dempsey has a wonderful post about names, concluding with some reflections on contemporary library cataloguing, and how we might handle things better in the future. He precedes his suggestions with the words "Authorities work - and think NACO here - is a professional activity, hedged around by rules and procedures; it is after all 'authorities' work." I did have to look up NACO - is is Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-36160873510815805472011-08-18T17:06:00.000+10:002011-08-18T17:06:44.737+10:00Word of the dayWhat is the opposite to "dumb down"? It needs an opposite. Dumbing down isn't a great concept, and we should be pushing the opposite, avoiding dumbing down where we can. The term is widely used, and even has a Wikipedia definition. Searching for antonyms doesn't work very well, since all of the sources of antonyms limit themselves to current English words or expressions, and I am mostly happy to Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-16415602676570191172011-08-10T08:28:00.001+10:002011-08-10T08:28:02.755+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is takestock, a noun, coined especially for Swinburne's senior management recently, when we all held a takestock. It is an illustration of something we all know - you can turn pretty much any part of speech into any other, and pretty much any two-word term into a runtogether.
Needless to say, the neologist at our takestock day did not coin the word. Google claims to have found 7.8 Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-66783951877496630302011-08-09T17:44:00.002+10:002011-08-09T21:08:29.531+10:00République de BananesThis is a Quebec website and blog, apparently a conservative one - styled L'autre Québec. I was initially intrigued because I am sure that that isn't the right translation of banana republic - for example, Wikipedia uses république bananière, and the Wictionnaire has a nice definition of this term, as well as of the new verb, bananiser, or to transform into a banana republic. Definitely a cult Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-38562542654922346472011-08-07T19:52:00.003+10:002011-08-08T15:22:35.353+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is crowdfunding - thank you to Helen Reid for this one. It provides an opportunity to resume this blog, and the word of the day, after a gap of almost a year. Thanks is also due to Sherman Young, whose blog post on the matter in turn quotes The Economist, which says:
"Enter Unbound, a British effort to “crowd-fund” books. Visitors to its website can pledge money for a book that is Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-88470994842526111772010-08-31T11:00:00.057+10:002010-09-01T10:57:00.877+10:00Welcome to Wattle DayToday, as all Australians know, is Wattle Day. Unfortunately my Facebook group, Wattle Day Should Be Australia's National Day, peaked at 16 members last year. Never mind: what better action on Wattle Day than to join.
Wattle Day is our ideal national day - its colours (green and gold) are our colours, and the flower is found in all parts of Australia. As a national day it unites us: OK with Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-18752539539547101912010-08-30T08:30:00.001+10:002010-08-30T08:30:00.976+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is mega-aggregate. As regular readers of this blog (not an oxymoron, I hope) know, I prefer runtogethers to hyphenated words, but in this case the conjunction of two as makes this confusing - megaaggregate.
My thanks to Ex Libris, our library systems vendor, for this term. In fact they may have invented it when they developed Primo Central, a search / discovery product. I came Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-83789346405822570482010-08-13T10:46:00.000+10:002010-08-13T10:46:30.168+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is lawyer up, a verb, and thank you to Professor Rob Moodie, a health educationalist and chairman of Melbourne Storm, for the term. Rob was speaking (as a Surrey Hills resident) at a breakfast in aid of Foundation Boroondara, a charitable organisation in this area.
The term lawyer up comes to us, like so many useful terms relating to the practice of law, from the United States. Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-11323045389264876712010-08-11T18:26:00.002+10:002010-08-12T12:07:47.265+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is cognitive surplus, and thank you to Nick Gruen for the word. Not totally new (from 2009?), but new to me. There's a great piece in Wired, for example, and a new book by Clay Shirky, Cognitive surplus: creativity and generository in a connected age, published in July and reviewed in many places, such as this one by Cory Doctorow in Boingboing.
The basic idea is that there is a Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-68033975402620773342010-08-04T17:55:00.000+10:002010-08-04T17:55:45.177+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is sandpit as a verb, as in the expression "We are sandpitting a Facebook site for the library." It means trying something out - having a go, in the Australian idiom. Oddly, this extremely useful neologism is less used than one might have thought. Most of the uses relate to small holes in glass or other surfaces, caused by sand, or to rectangular constructions filled with sand for Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-55547888893687364992010-05-14T17:50:00.001+10:002010-05-14T17:50:00.198+10:00Word of the dayToday's word is the German word Verschlimmbesserung, which means an improvement which makes things worse. Thank you to Gary, and to the New Scientist, for the word. It is hard to see how we got along for so long without out, especially those of us working in higher education. The word is a combination of Verbessern (make better/improve) and Verschlimmern (make/become worse), and there is a nice Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-15086975255638585352010-05-05T17:47:00.002+10:002010-05-05T17:49:01.863+10:00Google Book SettlementI am speaking on the Google Book Settlement next Tuesday for ten minutes without hestitation, repetition or deviation, and without Powerpoint. I am there because I am a librarian. Now read on . . .
I am seeking your help, mainly because this once worked wonderfully well when I had a similar gig (but only 3 minutes) to speak, as the librarian, about the Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales was the featured Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-2540167931839523292010-02-15T17:23:00.005+11:002010-02-15T17:23:00.476+11:00Word of the dayToday's word is rissole, used as a verb. This wonderful Australian usage was unknown to me until I read it in Clive James's recent book, The Revolt of the Pendulum: essays 2005-2008. James describes (page 193) rissole as "the classic Australian term, drawn from the culinary arts, for something being reduced to a wreck. (Used as a noun, the word 'rissole' denotes a kind of proto-hamburger, but Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-2413451645960303832010-02-14T12:11:00.003+11:002010-02-14T12:13:38.998+11:00Word of the dayThank you to Kim Tairi for technology petting zoo. Kim, as well as being a staff member here in the Swinburne University Library, is the Vice President of VALA. Last week was the biennial VALA Conference, a particularly important time for VALA, and for technological terms.
A petting zoo, as most of us know, is a usually mobile collection of animals suitable for interaction with young children.Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-23339356394056283612010-02-08T09:55:00.000+11:002010-02-08T09:55:31.967+11:00Civil liberties issue?There has been a great amount of discussion lately on the new MySchool website, and an interesting piece on it in The Australian of 30 January by Justine Ferrari. It is interesting that people have not often portrayed the issue as a civil liberties issue. On one hand, recent reports such as the excellent Gov 2.0 final report have recommended that government information should be made widely Derek Whiteheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998830708231021495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6147027827959013220.post-42059960747850789862010-02-01T18:39:00.002+11:002010-02-01T18:39:00.302+11:00Induction Processes
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